Stories from the trenches, by a fictional hiring partner at a large law firm in a major city.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Don't believe anyone who tells you being an attorney isn't a 24-hour-a-day job. My wife and I just got home from dinner at a client's house. This doesn't usually happen, but he's one of my biggest clients, and we play golf sometimes, and he thinks we're friends (and all the better for business if I play along), so he invited my wife and I over to his house. His wife has these yapping dogs she treats like they're her children and gives them specially-made food, and they wear monogrammed sweaters, and have their own room -- and it's really quite disturbing. She cooked a terrible, terrible meal -- which her husband loved, but my wife and I spent the whole time moving around our plates trying to be polite. His wife is an utter nutcase, she's constantly calling the firm "just to talk," and we have to indulge her and it's really quite awful. Her husband is a reasonably bright guy, and I don't know what he sees in this woman. My wife tells me I owe her some jewelry for sitting through dinner tonight, and this interminable conversation about the dogs, and whether it's okay for dogs to wear white after Labor Day, and whether we think there'd be a market for coats made from dog fur, if it was done in a humane way. Crazy.